Product Description

The heart is a most incredible pump. About the size of a fist and weighing only about as much as one of your sneakers, in an average lifetime a heart will beat over two thousand million times without stopping for rest or repair. The heart pushes a stream of blood through sixty thousand miles of arteries, capillaries, and veins, a journey that carries nutrients and oxygen to every cell in your body.

In stunning photographs that will amaze you with their beauty and color, you will also learn about bacteria-eating white blood cells, blood-clotting platelets, and the spongy marrow tissue, where every second three million red blood cells are made.

In The Heart, award-winning author Seymour Simon begins an exciting series that explores one of the most amazing mysteries in the universe-the human body. join him on a journey as strange and wonderful as any voyage to the stars.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1655482 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 32 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 3-5?Simon approaches the human heart as he approached outer space and oceans: as an adventure to be explored. As always, the full-page, full-color photographs are spectacular, and the text is crisp and full of detail. In a conversational yet instructive style, the author presents young readers with fascinating information that will almost certainly spur them on to read more. Topics include types of blood vessels, coronary bypass surgery, strokes, and anatomy of the heart. There is no index, but since each two-page spread clearly addresses a specific topic, one isn't necessary.?Christine A. Moesch, Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Gr. 3^-6. "Make a fist. This is about the size of your heart. Sixty to one hundred times every minute your heart muscles squeeze together and push blood around your body though tubes called blood vessels." Using the same format as Simon's series on astronomy, this well-designed book introduces the human circulatory system: the heart, the blood, the arteries and veins, the transfer of oxygen and carbon dioxide, the functions of various blood cells, and heart problems and their solutions. The text is succinct and direct, making the details understandable without losing the sense that the whole process of circulation is "strange and wonderful." On most spreads, the text appears on the left in fairly large type, while the illustrations appear on the facing pages. These often striking pictures include many computer-enhanced photographs as well as diagrams and highly enlarged images made possible by electron microscopes. Handsome and well-conceived in every way, this book provides an excellent introduction to its subject. Carolyn Phelan

From Kirkus Reviews
``Make a fist. This is about the size of your heart,'' Simon (Spring in America, p. 232, etc.) begins, and with this simple, concrete image he introduces the wonders of the human heart, circulatory system, and blood to a picture-book audience. Elsewhere, even abstract ideas become comprehensible, e.g., the average human body contains about twenty-five trillion red blood cells, or ``hundreds of times more blood cells than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.'' Stunning full-color photos appear on every page, many taken inside the human body with scanners, X rays, and other devices, and then computer-enhanced. The same science savvy and enthusiasm that has made Simon's titles on the universe so popular has been turned inward to uncover extraordinary facts about the human body. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8+) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.